The Ghosts of February – Muskoka’s stormscape

In the last dim light cast into the woodland, from the street lamps that line our lane, the wavering veil of snow flurries now settle across the landscape in gently painted strokes. The more rigorously twisting sprays of ice crystals appear in a ghostly pirouette, rising slowly, eerily from deep within the darkened moor….as if vapor from a boiling cauldron. The moor, this lowland across from Birch Hollow, becomes so poignantly haunted when the snow blows in off Lake Muskoka, in waves against the border evergreens and gnarled old hardwoods, down hard through the dried marsh grasses and brown, fractured cattails.
As a frustrated landscape artist, I decided to use pen and notebook decades ago, when it became apparent my descriptions in words were much more exact to what I was witnessing, than any attempt I made by brush and paint. I would stand out along the Lake Muskoka shore watching a winter storm lash down at the landscape, and I could imagine Canadian artist Tom Thomson, holed-up in some protected alcove, sketching the windblown scene being sculpted west to east, with perfectly contoured, iced-over snow drifts against the dark green cedar ridge.
I wished my interpretations, oil upon canvas, with furious, determined brush strokes, had re-created anything that resembled the storm in flight. I confess to writing about the landscape as a second choice to the art interpretation I longed to perfect. I spent hours as a youngster perched on some rock ridge or valley rim, mentally sketching what it all meant. As much as I could sketch a tree and shape a hill or hollow in the landscape, at best my work was in the rank and commonplace of “pretty pictures” for the sake of drawing. There was so much more to these vistas than hard lines and snaking water courses; crystalline waterfalls and leaning birches. It has been said of Tom Thomson that his paintings could inspire feelings of isolation, loneliness, coldness and awe, such as his well known depictions of the Northern Lights from his Algonquin vantage point. Some critics have argued he portrayed the spirit of the lakeland as no other artist since; as if he was a partner to legend and lore.
I have a great and enduring appreciation of artists and their work, whether impressionistic, true to life, a sculpture that depicts life in transition, or a creation of folk art that captures the essence and innocence of time and environs. As a collector, I possess hundreds of paintings and art pieces, crafted by artisans I deeply respect. I wish only, in some way, they could have been generated by this admirer’s artistic proficiency…..the painter “me” instead, the creator of fine art.
Over the past decade I have written hundreds of short literary pieces which I call my landscape collection, and I have composed each as a separate art panel, written just as an artist would apply shape, texture and coloration to canvas by parallel enterprise.
On this winter morning, for example, with its twisting, dancing shrouds of snow moving quickly across the lowland, the artist would find immense opportunity to interpret spirits in revelry…. on this final day of January, in the year 2007. I find myself attempting to describe this spiritual merging of nature and legend, and fumbling about for the right words; much as a painter unable to match paint hue to sky blue, dark gray of shadow and striking white of snow and daylight. Words I fear that can never truly paint the essence of such visual, natural beauty unveiling before me. How can I capture for posterity the enhancements of this scene, without appearing the self-absorbed poet, the novelist lodged in the quagmire of lowly pulp fiction? As the voyeur stands at once speechless, staring into the tempest of a Thomson storm, then so gently easing to the gentle offering of an Algonquin autumn, a spring lakeside, or stirs again in the compelling presence of “The West Wind,” this writer can only cradle the hope, of one day finding the words to relate parallel experience with such profound reaction.
I remember making a claim, in a biographical piece back in the early 1990’s, that my mission as a writer, along the path of this mortal coil, was to one day be able to write about a particular landscape, a natural event, storm or mirroring lake, as well as Tom Thomson would have applied paint to board during those definitive Algonquin years. I can not today find even one piece that attains Thomson’s competence, thusly it remains this writer’s holy grail…..,to one day read-back a journal entry, and feel that it was absolutely representative of what I witnessed in the field. There are times when I feel the mission is simply unattainable and my work a misery of missed opportunity. The curious other side has been the mission itself, and the energy within, which seems an enduring fountain of interest. Despite so many failed attempts to deliver what I believe to be “a perfect canvas,” (written as it is) it always seems so much more important to endure whatever self loathing arrives in company, to carry on the same regardless. I can not simply look out over such an amazing vista and remain uninspired, or disinterested in putting the scene to print. If there is any real hope I might one day attain this elusive success in interpretation, I imagine it will be the result of this perpetual, seemingly endless pool of inspiration, as if spirit-sent, to maintain these vigils….even at the risk of one day freezing in the statuesque pose of “forever watcher in the woods.”
It is strikingly cold standing here, overlooking the work of wind and snow across the bog-land. Even though I’m protected by the willowy boughs of evergreen, and the ridge of woodland above the marsh, there is a sharp needle of ice striking painfully upon the flesh of toes and fingers, reminding the watcher how dangerous it can be to get lost in the ecstasy, the fantasy of a winter storm. It is worth the experience of frost and stabbing wind, to watch this world transform; the powerful gusts of wind breaking off snow burdened boughs across the bowl of this earth, sending plumes of crystal ice spiraling into a ghostly mist back up into the silver sky of just-now daybreak. You can’t witness this stormscape for more than a few seconds without wincing in mortal awe about the true rage of nature upon itself in this magnificent triumph of transition.
It would be impossible, without being witness in actuality, to truly appreciate the resolve of nature to transform itself, however violently we might perceive, toward its own new reality. How small and insignificant our mortal will when backdropped by this behemoth master of the universe.
What if this raging storm now, was to entomb us in this shimmering ice field? What final adjectives would we use to describe the beginning of the end.
We all need to pay more attention to the nature of which we are a junior member.
Thank you for joining this final blog entry for January 2007.


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